In a CBS “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday, former Mossad brokers lifted the lid on Israel’s Hezbollah pager assault, claiming that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was compelled to witness the deaths of his personal safety element inside his bunker as their compromised communication gadgets detonated.
According to the CBS News report, the intelligence company spent a decade infiltrating Hezbollah’s provide chain with weaponised communication gadgets that finally helped flip the tide of warfare in Lebanon.
Speaking by way of masks and utilizing pseudonyms, two retired senior brokers known as Gabriel and Michael described to CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl how they carried out the exact assault, including that Hezbollah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah noticed folks subsequent to him get hit by the pager blasts.
“Nasrallah, once we function the beeper operation, simply subsequent to him within the bunker, a number of folks had a beeper receiving the message. And in his in personal eyes, he noticed them collapsing,” Gabriel mentioned.
When the terrorist chief gave a speech two days later, “If you take a look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel added. “He already lose the warfare. And his soldier take a look at him throughout that speech. And they noticed a damaged chief. And this was the tipping level of the warfare.”
The brokers additionally detailed how they reworked walkie-talkies and pagers into precision weapons.
“A walkie-talkie was a weapon identical to a bullet or a missile or a mortar,” defined the agent recognized as Michael, describing the operation’s first part. When Stahl pressed for particulars in regards to the gadget’s development, Michael revealed that “contained in the battery, there’s an explosive gadget,” which was “made in Israel” at a Mossad facility.
The ingenuity of the operation lay not simply within the technical execution however within the elaborate deception marketing campaign that accompanied it. Through a community of shell firms and faux enterprise entities, Mossad managed to promote greater than 16,000 explosive-laden gadgets to Hezbollah over a number of years, “60 Minutes” reported.
“We have an unbelievable array of potentialities of making international firms that haven’t any approach being traced again to Israel,” Michael mentioned. “Shell firms over shell firms to have an effect on the provision chain to our favor. We create a faux world. We are a world manufacturing firm. We write the screenplay, we’re the administrators, we’re the producers, we’re the primary actors, and the world is our stage.”
By 2022, emboldened by the success of the walkie-talkie operation, Mossad expanded its technique to incorporate pagers. However, the transition wasn’t easy. “I bear in mind the day that I got here to our director, put it on the desk. And he was livid,” recalled the second agent, recognized as Gabriel. “He was telling us, ‘There isn’t any likelihood that anybody will purchase such a giant gadget. It’s not snug of their pocket. It’s heavy.’”
Despite preliminary skepticism, Gabriel spent two weeks convincing Mossad management that the pager’s obvious drawbacks might be changed into promoting factors. The company launched a classy advertising and marketing marketing campaign, creating pretend YouTube ads that promoted the gadgets as premium merchandise.
“We make promoting films and brochures, and we put it on web. And it grew to become the most effective product within the pager space on the planet,” Gabriel advised Stahl. The advertising and marketing was so efficient that Mossad needed to subject buy requests from professional clients, which they deflected by quoting exorbitant costs.
The operation’s success hinged on sustaining an impenetrable facade of legitimacy. Mossad established a partnership with Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese pager producer, by way of entrance firms. “When they’re shopping for from us, they’ve zero clue that they’re shopping for from the Mossad,” Gabriel defined. “We make like ‘Truman Show,’ every thing is managed by us behind the scenes. In their expertise, every thing is regular. Everything was 100% kosher, together with businessmen, advertising and marketing, engineers, showroom, every thing.”
The technical sophistication of the operation prolonged to the gadgets’ design. Each pager underwent intensive testing to make sure exact results. “We take a look at every thing, triple, double, a number of occasions in an effort to be sure that there’s minimal harm,” mentioned Gabriel. The company even performed analysis on common response occasions to pager alerts—roughly seven seconds—and engineered particular ringtones to maximise consumer engagement.
When Stahl enquired in regards to the detonation mechanism, Gabriel revealed that customers obtained messages claiming to comprise encrypted data that required urgent two buttons to entry. However, as Gabriel defined, “It’s the identical impact. It’s gonna explode anyway.” The remaining detonation alerts had been triggered from Israel.
On 17 September at exactly 3:30pm, 1000’s of pagers started beeping throughout Lebanon. The following day, the decade-old walkie-talkies had been activated, some detonating at funerals for victims of the pager assaults. The precision of the gadgets was evident in movies reviewed by “60 Minutes,” displaying explosions that wounded pager carriers whereas leaving close by people unhurt.
TOPSHOT – A photograph taken on September 18, 2024, in Beirut’s southern suburbs reveals the stays of exploded pagers on show at an undisclosed location. Hundreds of pagers utilized by Hezbollah members exploded throughout Lebanon on September 17, killing not less than 9 folks and wounding round 2,800 in blasts the Iran-backed militant group blamed on Israel. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP by way of Getty Images)
“A day after the pagers exploded, folks had been afraid to activate the air conditioners in Lebanon as a result of they had been afraid that they’d explode,” Michael advised Stahl, describing the psychological impression of the operation. “So there was actual worry.”
The aftermath of the assaults demonstrated their strategic effectiveness. According to Gabriel, the operation wasn’t primarily about inflicting casualties. “If he’s simply lifeless, so he’s lifeless,” he defined. “But if he [is] wounded, you must take him to the hospital, maintain him. You want to speculate cash and energy. And these folks with out arms and eyes live proof, strolling in Lebanon, of ‘don’t mess with us.’”
The mixed assaults resulted in roughly 30 fatalities, together with two kids, and wounded round 3,000 folks. In the aftermath, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah delivered what former brokers described as an uncharacteristically subdued speech, earlier than being killed in an Israeli airstrike on his bunker on 27 September. A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took impact on the finish of November.
